My experience is that current investors want you to hire tons of people to shorten your runway so they can force you into another round where they can buy more shares and dilute the founders more.

That might be part of it, but also VCs are not interested in $100 mil exits, they rather you go all out and either capture the market or die trying.

I always wonder how much of the faibled 99% start-up failures are up to that attitude. Imagine to settle for 100 million exit, at maybe 2x, more often. Couldn't it be tgat VCs would ve more profitable? Serious question, bevause VCs are professionals in what they do and they definitely have a reason. A reason that totally eludes me.

I always thought Uber could be a nice billion plus business modernizing the taxi business and providing software to run it, but no, they had to grow so much to legally fight whole countries and upset regulations

I always have to adjust for this as an early-career engineer aspiring to start my own startup. It's insanely intimidating looking at companies with multi-million or billion-dollar valuations, but my definition of a "successful" company is probably vastly different than what most hyper-growth VCs are looking for.

I'm always more interested in the low-fixed-cost software businesses like Sublime Text, Pinboard, or Hwaci (SQLite)

the answer is no probably not. VC for tech startup exist because of economy of scale of tech and is ruled by power law. one winner that returns 100x is much more important than a handful that return 2x.

to be clear most VC funds are not actually able to do that.

They would have to adjust their strategy and be more selective in the companies they invest in. And they of course know that they aren't actually very good at picking winners, so that strategy is out.

Have they not heard of the mythical man month?

Interesting and funny documentary from the dot com boom era in a finish company, riot entertainment. Great watch on the insanity of VC funding and growth.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E

Haha, I have watched that documentary multiple times, it is great and deserves to be turned into a film.

Someone's earlier point about hiring as a growth indicator to VC's reminds me of the point made by the CEO in the documentary about how VCs told him he needed to have 100 employees in order to boost the value of the company, so they ended up hiring people off the street, spouses and family members.

Crazy story.

That's the equivalent of counting the number of lines of code to see how much work you did that day as a developer.

I'm always stoked when my daily contribution is a negative number of LoC

It really shows how "free" capital has been last few years if the VCs can use that broken as heuristics and survive (even thrive).